


Circles

by sophiagratia



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-29
Updated: 2013-05-29
Packaged: 2017-12-13 08:53:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/822415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiagratia/pseuds/sophiagratia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Nerys seeks peace with what she can't be, do, or know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Circles

**Author's Note:**

> For [Three](http://threeofeight.tumblr.com) and her three-word prompt, 'Kira/Dax : cold, crinkle, promenade'.

They’ve developed their own set of clichés. It didn’t take long. Easy habits easy to fall into.  
  
The cold of Jadzia’s hands against the heat of hers.  
  
The way Jadzia crinkles her nose to match hers, to make her smile.  
  
Long walks on the promenade.  
  
Romance like those old picture-postcards Jake collects from Earth.  
  
It makes her so uneasy she loses sleep. Her stomach turns. Her hands shake and she sweats.  
  
She runs laps on the upper level of the promenade, very late at night, to shake off the uneasiness. Stripped to her briefs and her tank, she runs barefoot, and the security officers on patrol stand to attention as she passes, and it would be comical but she thinks it’s good for them to see the power in her shoulders and her thighs as she runs and sweats in the artificial night-cold of the promenade, very late.  
  
Claustrophobia is not a thing she’s ever felt before. Never in the dankest cave, the lowest bunker, the most cramped of sub-impulse shuttlecrafts.  
  
She feels it now. She feels it even running, her footsteps loud and hollow in the echoing silence of the station’s artificial night.  
  
She feels it most when she should feel it least: in the closeness of Jadzia’s body to her own. What should make her safe stops her breath and sends her into panic.  
  
Jadzia kisses her, sweet and slow, and it’s a kind thing – but then Jadzia smiles, crinkling up her nose, and her breath comes short and it takes her a long while to realize it’s not desire but panic.  
  
Jadzia’s cold, calm hand grazes the small of her back, first thing when she walks into Ops in the morning, and at first it’s sweet, familiar, kind – but then she wonders what expectation is in it, what sweet, familiar thing she must return in exchange for it, and her hands shake and she has to catch her breath.  
  
So she runs, and she’s running in circles. It’s too too literal, but it’s what she can think of. She avoids Jadzia and her cold, familiar hands, avoids Jadzia’s bed, and ducks out into the cold, artificial night to run in circles.  
  
Repetition soothes her, and it’s strange, because it’s repetition that scares her, too. Her hollow footfalls on the flat, clean carpet late at night, the same circle again and again, give a shape to the thing that scares her.  
  
Day after day. Her shift at one hour. Sleep at one hour. The same faces, the same work, the same rote tasks, daily, weekly, monthly, drawing on into yearly. Her routine, this new life.  
  
Her footsteps, running on the promenade, give shape to her thoughts.  
  
 _I don’t know how to do this._  
  
The same, day by day.  
  
 _I don’t know how to be with you._  
  
Day after day, her, always her. Steady, calm, and cold, day after day.  
  
 _I don’t know how to be what you expect._  
  
Day after day, always to be the same. Always to be there to fulfill an expectation she can anticipate but does not understand.  
  
So she runs, night after night, to keep these thoughts in their shape and preserve herself from what they threaten, all they seem to promise she will never learn.  
  
It catches up with her; they notice, the others, that she’s not sleeping; Jadzia notices, too, that she avoids her; still she runs, night after night, hollow footfalls in the cold of the promenade and the stiff salutes as she passes by, in circles, again and again.  
  
Because there are no secrets on this station, one night, Jadzia catches up with her. Running in her briefs and tank, Starfleet-issue, still the picture of an officer even barefoot with her hair a messy knot atop her head, Jadzia catches up with her and runs silent beside her. They circle the promenade, once, twice, and she tries but she can’t outrun her.  
  
So she starts talking.  
  
 _I don’t know how to do this._  
  
 _I don’t know how to be with you._  
  
 _I don’t know how to be what you expect._  
  
 _Day after day, you, and this, again, and then the same again, I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to be the same, day after day._  
  
Jadzia keeps her silence. Lap after lap, they run together, evenly matched, pace for pace. They run in circles, and their hollow footfalls give a shape to her words, pound out her words between them.  
  
And then Jadzia stops. She runs on a few paces, and finds she can’t, anymore. She stops, too, and turns, breathing hard, sweating in the cold, and waits.  
  
Jadzia catches her breath, hands on hips, gleaming in the dim light of the artificial night. ‘I don’t know, either, Nerys. How to do this, how to be with you, how to be what you expect. In three hundred years, nothing I have ever done has ever been the same twice. You’re a new thing to me every day. Every day, I don’t know what will happen. In three hundred years, I never have.’ Jadzia pauses, breathing hard.  
  
Nerys is stuck back at the beginning, on her name. The way Jadzia says her name. The rest takes a while to catch up to her. ‘Jadzia,’ she says, as though testing the word, to see if it will hold.  
  
‘I don’t know how to do this, Nerys. But I do know that all I want from you is you, whoever you are now and whoever you will be tomorrow, and if you don’t know who that is, neither do I. But I want to find out, and I’d like it if you let me.’  
  
Nerys is frozen in place, and her heart is pounding and her breath comes short – but, she thinks, in a new way.  
  
Then suddenly, Jadzia laughs. ‘Anyway it’s just too much to keep running in circles, Nerys.’ Jadzia crosses the space between them, lays her hands on her shoulders. ‘Not least because I’m faster than you are.’  
  
It’s funny, for some reason. ‘Like hell you are,’ Nerys says.  
  
And Jadzia winks. And Jadzia’s nose crinkles up. And Jadzia’s hands are cold on her hot shoulders.  
  
She doesn’t know what to say, and it’s a little hard to breathe, in this new way, standing there like that. So Nerys wipes her brow and shakes herself off; she kicks back a little and turns and picks up her pace. ‘Catch up, Jadzia,’ she calls, her footfalls sounding hollow on the promenade in the artificial cold of the artificial night.  
  
They pound out in their footsteps the words that stand between them, silent for one lap, and then another, and a third – and then down the stairs and through the corridors, their silent path through the silence of the station and the silent salutes that follow them, and Nerys slaps the panel at the door to her quarters and takes Jadzia’s hand in hers and they go in together, into the unknown new thing, into whatever comes next.


End file.
